I've found that guys with 5 kids who owe several years of back child support and buy lottery tickets are generally pretty responsible, so lets not jump to conclusions. Spending $2 on a powerball ticket instead of a condom doesn't make him bad, it makes him an American hero. BACK OFF.

patchvonbraun:So, I owe, on paper, a metric arseload of back spousal support. No matter that the ex is getting 56% of my net income. What she *wants* amounts to 70% of my net income, and I just simply can't afford that and continue to live in a building, rather than a cardboard box.

The amount she *wants* is based on a legal and financial fiction. It was calculated based on my earnings from a job I no longer had when we split up--right at the time the economy was going south, and Nortel laid me off.

So, now, I have a job that pays me 50% less than I was making at Nortel, and I can't afford a lawyer to get things legally reduced, and she's indicated that she won't agree to that. I can't qualify for legal aid, because, well, I'm working. But I totally, utterly, don't have the cash-flow to support a $3K visit or two to court. So, I'm stuck "underpaying" my support every month, with the notional arrears mounting up.

Am I a deadbeat dad as a result? I don't think so. My ex gets more of my money than I do, and I'm servicing the communal debt while she sits on her fat ass and refuses to work. But if you looked at the amounts I owe in back spousal support, it could easily qualify for the kind of "shocking headline" we have before us. And in no way, shape, or form, am I a deadbeat dad or deadbeat ex husband.

/divorce laws, they are the suck

For three months of what you're paying in child support, I can make your wife problem "go away," if you catch my drift. She's gotta walk down a flight of stairs sometime, ya know? I can help you.

You're hurt. You need meds. You go to where all the meds are. Somebody who owns all the meds, doesn't need or use the meds, says "sorry, MY meds, motherf*cker". Is that what money is for? Conscionable actions. You can't fake them. Money is a convenience and, and this is easily researched, nothing more than IOUs for things we actually use. We create things to serve humanity. The people who put them on a high shelf serve nothing and nobody and they eventually move into the lawn food business, too. Ha ha.

Masta Kronix:Tatterdemalian: Masta Kronix: One can argue there are actions that hurt society as a whole when it comes to quality of life and progress however you would then have to define a Universal Metric for what Quality of Life and Progress means and prove that's the undisputed metric by which we should use.

Sadly, proving such a metric is not possible without sufficient precognitive powers to foresee every single challenge to the definition for the rest of eternity. Perhaps a rewording is in order, such as creating a metric that is capable of adapting to a wide variety of circumstances, and can even be suspended or abandoned if survival can be proven to depend on doing so.

/here in the USA, we have this thing we call a Constitution//it's worked for 200 or so years, though it didn't account for the possibility that representation without taxation could be just as damaging as taxation without representation

Expect the Constitution hasn't really worked all that well for the past 200 years when you consider the condition America is in at this moment in time.

If the Constitution was such a great document, we wouldn't be in the situation we find ourselves in as a country.

We constantly ranked below other countries in almost all measurable metrics.

We're just now getting around to deciding whether or not states have the right to deny Marriage Equality to a whole section of the United States Populace, using the constitution as a reference.

Yes, surely the Constitution is the end all document that we should all refer to when making decisions based on current issues.

Human Beings 200 years ago knew more about the complexities of society and how to solve those complexities then current human beings today.

lymond01:sammyk: Slaxl: what_now: sammyk: Not everyone that owes back child support is a bad person subby.

If you've never been on the receiving end of family court you really do not know what you are talking about.

Ok, but he hasn't paid child support since 2009. So I'm ok with saying he's probably a bad person.

Perhaps he doesn't have any money?

I wonder if maybe there was some sort of economic factor beyond his control. Something like a worldwide recession and unprecedented high unemployment.

Meanwhile the mother has to pay all the bills herself or accept welfare when she may not need to if her baby daddy would contribute. Stuff happens, sure, but I hope he puts the kid and the mothet through life with his winnings otherwise I'm on subby's side.

Why should he pay a dime more than he owes? And why the fark would anyone be expected to support an ex? If dude wanted to pay that biatches way he wouldn't have kicked her to the curb in the first place.